Background

Showruiners traditionally use the title Darth before their name (ie. Darth Davies, Darth Moffat) and usually get the job by assassinating their predecessor. The showruiners are the archenemies of the Doctor, the fans and the audience.

The Three Families have been battling for control of the show since the beginning. Sheev Moffat, leader of the Moffat clan, is the current Führer of the Doctor Who Empire.

Classic Who

In the days of NuWho these roles have been neatly funnelled into one. All are known to use Storytelling devicesto achieve their evil ends.

Clearly, the way to save the show is to split the job back up. Script editor doesn't mean what it used to, so call it Lead Writer. Plenty of BBC shows have a Lead Writer. He can work out the story arc, write 5 or 6 episodes, work with the Executive Producer to pick other writers, and work with the Script editor to forge all of the stories into a cohesive whole, but he wouldn't have to do all the producing and scheduling and director wrangling and marketing and other stuff.

Imagine how much better The Moff's episodes would have been if he hadn't assigned himself 700 days of work to do in 150 days, or missed a whole year worth of episodes. Jamie Mathieson, who says he'd be a crap showrunner because he doesn't know how to do all that production stuff, would be even better. Or Paul Cornell, or Neil Gaiman, or most of the other people that fans pitch as the one true future showrunner.

Meanwhile, if RTD did all that production stuff, but only wrote an episode or two instead of writing half the season and rewriting all of the other episodes, he would have been great. Even Chibs could probably do that—hell, even Gary Russell.

/who/

Everybody on /who/ spends all day trying to decide who was the worst showruiner, but the obvious and only true answer is John Nathan-Turnip.

Honorable Mention: Tom Motherfucking Baker. The following material isn’t just made-up /who/ bullshit but 100% authentic and verifiable Tom Baker bullshit: He wanted to have a talking cabbage for a companion and also wrote a movie script with Harry Sullivan where the Doctor meets the devil and plays pinball against him, with the The Doctor inside the pinball itself, WTF?! Fortunately no one listened. Sadly the BBC will publish the fucking thing in 2019 [edit: >implying this wouldn't be GOAT]